Apple doesn't need every iPad buyer to purchase a lot of apps, just as long as many of the buyers purchase apps they get good profits. The most important piece is grabbing marketshare early. The longer Google and Microsoft and anyone else waits to get a competent iPad competitor to market, the more customer brand recognition and vendor development focus Apple will get. Apple is displaying excellent business sense here and I'm astonished that nobody else is trying as hard to get into the game early.
I really hope top notch, competitively priced alternatives to the iPad come out soon. I don't have anything against Apple or the iPad, I just think competition will drive prices down, encourage more investment in innovation, and ultimately help everyone.
This type of thing is inevitable when you have a huge codebase, in any project. But starting over is a path to disaster - there might be 10,000 outstanding bugs in the current Firefox codebase, but there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of fixed bugs in it too, and a restart tosses more good than bad.
Think of Netscape, they were the king of the browser market. They did a clean restart, and it took them so long to create anything useful that Netscape never recovered.
Firefox might need improvements to their development process, but they don't need to chuck all of their existing code and start over.
But the belt draws the power continuously, while the electrical system only draws the power when it's actually needed.
So even if the electrical system is far less efficient when it runs, if it only needs to run 20% (to invent a number) of the time you operate the vehicle, you still cut down dramatically on wasted energy.
Correction: Ford has the highest mileage midsize sedan hybrid with the Fusion Hybrid, which beats the Toyota Camry Hybrid - and I think the upcoming Hyundai Sonata Hybrid will steal that title from it. For most efficient hybrid, period, the Prius and Civic Hybrids still beat the Fusion Hybrid, but they're smaller.
But generally speaking I agree with you. Research the features, technical options, combination of fuel economy, power, and vehicle weight and size, active and passive safety features, crash safety, and so forth of the current Ford US domestic market product lineup. For the first time in decades, Ford is competitive with well over half its vehicles.
This is a government problem, not an industry problem. Adding this feature to vehicles has a cost - if it was cheap, BMW, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Volkswagen, or some other automaker would offer it in their American lineup already.
The solution is to modify the US government fuel economy ratings system so that it takes into account stop and go driving. Then this move will become an effective way to boost Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) ratings.
The system usually only operates once the engine is at a normal operating temperature, so it can shut off for a few seconds without affecting the way it heats the cabin in winter. If you take lots of short drives, it won't help you.
Not all software developer jobs suck. Maybe I've been just ludicrously lucky, but I'm paid well, treated nicely, and work 40 hours a week. Depending upon where you are you may not be able to find a job like that. But they do exist. I'm sure if my first few jobs in the field were like your experience, I wouldn't be doing this any more either. Good luck.
In terms of backups, I'm starting to think that people would effectively benefit from something like an automatic remote revision control system (like Subversion, Git, Mercurial, etc...) and a background process on their laptop or PC that runs every few hours and just commits local changes to a local and remote repository. Then you get backups, historical backups with the ability to revert by date and time, and an efficient use of disk space (since only modified files are backed up).
But obviously for end users unfamiliar with revision control systems you would need a very user-friendly GUI to retrieve older copies of lost files.
Mythbusters is closer to real peer-reviewed science then most of the political, religious, economic, and health beliefs held by large portions of the world population. I'll take a large but flawed step in the right direction over the status quo, thank you very much.
I agree with you, although I don't care if someone only gets into teaching for the money, as long as they're competent at it.
On the other hand, it's difficult to judge teacher competence because parent involvement is a huge factor in the success of education. A great teacher will still get mixed results with a class of kids with parents working long hours, too illiterate, or too apathetic to help their children learn. A mediocre teacher will get better results with a class of kids with motivated, educated parents that have the time to help their children.
So I support good pay for good teachers in principle, but I'm not sure we can devise a sufficiently useful metric for judging teacher skill when parental involvement - which they can't control - is a big factor.
Yeah, I just started using Scala for some minor projects at work and then all this nonsense starts happening. Obviously Java is not going to disappear today or even next year, but I'm far less enthusiastic about the long term prospects of the JVM than I was a few months ago.
That's not really true. Any C++ programmer can learn everything they'll ever need to know about Java syntax in less than a week. But learning the Java standard library enough that you don't need to do a web search to understand an unfamiliar API in every 20 lines of code you read will take a lot longer.
Similar problems exist for learning just about any other language. The core syntax is child's play to learn, the hard part - and one of the reasons job postings ask for years of experience - is all the standard library, the builtin functions, and so forth.
Haskell is an excellent language, but it's not in demand at all. Learn it for fun, learn it for the skills you will develop that will carry over to other languages you use, but don't be too hopeful for paid employment that uses Haskell.
I've written some toy apps with Scala, and it's fantastic. Even if you just use it as a much more concise Java, it's a big improvement.
I am unhappy with Oracle's recent moves with Java, and want to avoid the JVM and its offshoots entirely if possible. But Java pays the bills, and I can sell my employer on adding Scala to some of our projects. Bringing in a language more dissimilar to Java, like Ruby, Python, C#, Haskell, etc... would be a much harder sell to the executives and to the rest of the developers.
In an ideal world I think I would work mostly with Haskell and Perl6. But I've been tinkering with both, and I'm not skilled enough to do much useful with them yet.
Applying never hurts, but if we ask for five years of experience in the post and don't see at least two years of experience in the response, you better have a damn good set of other characteristics that offset the missing experience. Something like open source development with code examples, published articles in an IEEE magazine related to our programming language and problem domain, and so forth.
Many of the languages you listed have stable, proven libraries or even builtin language features that support coroutines, which have no deadlocks and no critical sections. They also support other parallel programming paradigms besides traditional locks. Now I grant that Erlang is a fine language, and I'm not familiar with any other language that can be updated on the fly without a restart in the same was as Erlang. But it's not head and shoulders above the others.
More importantly, it is beginning to appear that the big computing tools of the future are smart phones and netbooks, and with their cost and energy constraints we won't be seeing 16 cores in common use for a while yet.
I know 40 hours a week is a big chunk of time, but I don't work so I can love my job. I work so I can enjoy the time I am not working. I'd rather have a job I can stand with enough money to live well outside the work versus a job I enjoy and a much lower standard of living (and especially a much lower rate of saving for retirement).
Now if I hate my job so much that I can't be productive at it, then obviously a change is necessary.
I think your post is accurate. I worked with C++ for four years and then jumped to Java. It was easy. For amusement, four years after that I tried to jump back to C++ and write a simple program that toyed with buffers. It took a long time to make it compile and even longer before it ran without segfault, and I was writing something I use to create routinely at that previous job.
I'm sure it's difficult. But teaching math in a terrible school district is not easy either. And at least when you screw up the fast food job, you get into trouble and the company loses some money. When you screw up teaching, your students are set up for problems due to poor education that can affect their entire lives.
I hate taxes as much as anyone, but I really think paying (good) teachers top dollar is one of the best moves any country can make to ensure their economic future.
I think this is a difficult area to debate in moral terms because buying better locks for your house doors or a higher model fire extinguisher or a fancier security system for your home does not increase the risk that you kill your neighbor. That makes it difficult to compare car shopping to other forms of personal protection.
But my vehicles routinely transport my four children around, and if my driveway and my budget had room for a school bus, that's what I would use to transport them. I am sympathetic to people who can't afford to participate in this constant escalation of vehicle sizes, and I am also sympathetic to environmental concerns and the desire for independence from oil imports. But I am not willing to take extra risks with my children. We drive two relative giants: Honda Odyssey (aced all crash tests save one in use at the time of its manufacture) and a Ford Flex (aces all current crash tests).
Smaller vehicles like the Mazda5 and Kia Rondo were ruled out because of only average crash test scores, and vehicles like the Kia Sorento, Subaru Tribeca, or Toyota Rav4 were ruled out because they have no side curtain airbag coverage for the third row seats. And many smaller vehicles have no space behind the third row seat, which means a relatively mild rear impact can affect third row occupants. I've seen vehicles with their last row of seats totally destroyed, I refuse to seat my kids in anything with less than a foot of crumple space - that's far from ironclad protection, but at least it's something.
Before I had a family, I didn't care if I commuted on a scooter.
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We use Ubuntu in a corporate environment too. No problems.
If you don't like Mono, remove it. What's the big deal?
Apple doesn't need every iPad buyer to purchase a lot of apps, just as long as many of the buyers purchase apps they get good profits. The most important piece is grabbing marketshare early. The longer Google and Microsoft and anyone else waits to get a competent iPad competitor to market, the more customer brand recognition and vendor development focus Apple will get. Apple is displaying excellent business sense here and I'm astonished that nobody else is trying as hard to get into the game early.
I really hope top notch, competitively priced alternatives to the iPad come out soon. I don't have anything against Apple or the iPad, I just think competition will drive prices down, encourage more investment in innovation, and ultimately help everyone.
This type of thing is inevitable when you have a huge codebase, in any project. But starting over is a path to disaster - there might be 10,000 outstanding bugs in the current Firefox codebase, but there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of fixed bugs in it too, and a restart tosses more good than bad.
Think of Netscape, they were the king of the browser market. They did a clean restart, and it took them so long to create anything useful that Netscape never recovered.
Firefox might need improvements to their development process, but they don't need to chuck all of their existing code and start over.
Ford used to sell a sedan named the Galaxy. Was your reference intentional? I am just curious.
But the belt draws the power continuously, while the electrical system only draws the power when it's actually needed.
So even if the electrical system is far less efficient when it runs, if it only needs to run 20% (to invent a number) of the time you operate the vehicle, you still cut down dramatically on wasted energy.
Correction: Ford has the highest mileage midsize sedan hybrid with the Fusion Hybrid, which beats the Toyota Camry Hybrid - and I think the upcoming Hyundai Sonata Hybrid will steal that title from it. For most efficient hybrid, period, the Prius and Civic Hybrids still beat the Fusion Hybrid, but they're smaller.
But generally speaking I agree with you. Research the features, technical options, combination of fuel economy, power, and vehicle weight and size, active and passive safety features, crash safety, and so forth of the current Ford US domestic market product lineup. For the first time in decades, Ford is competitive with well over half its vehicles.
This is a government problem, not an industry problem. Adding this feature to vehicles has a cost - if it was cheap, BMW, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Volkswagen, or some other automaker would offer it in their American lineup already.
The solution is to modify the US government fuel economy ratings system so that it takes into account stop and go driving. Then this move will become an effective way to boost Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) ratings.
The system usually only operates once the engine is at a normal operating temperature, so it can shut off for a few seconds without affecting the way it heats the cabin in winter. If you take lots of short drives, it won't help you.
Not all software developer jobs suck. Maybe I've been just ludicrously lucky, but I'm paid well, treated nicely, and work 40 hours a week. Depending upon where you are you may not be able to find a job like that. But they do exist. I'm sure if my first few jobs in the field were like your experience, I wouldn't be doing this any more either. Good luck.
In terms of backups, I'm starting to think that people would effectively benefit from something like an automatic remote revision control system (like Subversion, Git, Mercurial, etc...) and a background process on their laptop or PC that runs every few hours and just commits local changes to a local and remote repository. Then you get backups, historical backups with the ability to revert by date and time, and an efficient use of disk space (since only modified files are backed up).
But obviously for end users unfamiliar with revision control systems you would need a very user-friendly GUI to retrieve older copies of lost files.
Mythbusters is closer to real peer-reviewed science then most of the political, religious, economic, and health beliefs held by large portions of the world population. I'll take a large but flawed step in the right direction over the status quo, thank you very much.
I agree with you, although I don't care if someone only gets into teaching for the money, as long as they're competent at it.
On the other hand, it's difficult to judge teacher competence because parent involvement is a huge factor in the success of education. A great teacher will still get mixed results with a class of kids with parents working long hours, too illiterate, or too apathetic to help their children learn. A mediocre teacher will get better results with a class of kids with motivated, educated parents that have the time to help their children.
So I support good pay for good teachers in principle, but I'm not sure we can devise a sufficiently useful metric for judging teacher skill when parental involvement - which they can't control - is a big factor.
Yeah, I just started using Scala for some minor projects at work and then all this nonsense starts happening. Obviously Java is not going to disappear today or even next year, but I'm far less enthusiastic about the long term prospects of the JVM than I was a few months ago.
That's not really true. Any C++ programmer can learn everything they'll ever need to know about Java syntax in less than a week. But learning the Java standard library enough that you don't need to do a web search to understand an unfamiliar API in every 20 lines of code you read will take a lot longer.
Similar problems exist for learning just about any other language. The core syntax is child's play to learn, the hard part - and one of the reasons job postings ask for years of experience - is all the standard library, the builtin functions, and so forth.
Haskell is an excellent language, but it's not in demand at all. Learn it for fun, learn it for the skills you will develop that will carry over to other languages you use, but don't be too hopeful for paid employment that uses Haskell.
MSSQL is the fastest kid on the block?
I've written some toy apps with Scala, and it's fantastic. Even if you just use it as a much more concise Java, it's a big improvement.
I am unhappy with Oracle's recent moves with Java, and want to avoid the JVM and its offshoots entirely if possible. But Java pays the bills, and I can sell my employer on adding Scala to some of our projects. Bringing in a language more dissimilar to Java, like Ruby, Python, C#, Haskell, etc... would be a much harder sell to the executives and to the rest of the developers.
In an ideal world I think I would work mostly with Haskell and Perl6. But I've been tinkering with both, and I'm not skilled enough to do much useful with them yet.
Applying never hurts, but if we ask for five years of experience in the post and don't see at least two years of experience in the response, you better have a damn good set of other characteristics that offset the missing experience. Something like open source development with code examples, published articles in an IEEE magazine related to our programming language and problem domain, and so forth.
Many of the languages you listed have stable, proven libraries or even builtin language features that support coroutines, which have no deadlocks and no critical sections. They also support other parallel programming paradigms besides traditional locks. Now I grant that Erlang is a fine language, and I'm not familiar with any other language that can be updated on the fly without a restart in the same was as Erlang. But it's not head and shoulders above the others.
More importantly, it is beginning to appear that the big computing tools of the future are smart phones and netbooks, and with their cost and energy constraints we won't be seeing 16 cores in common use for a while yet.
I know 40 hours a week is a big chunk of time, but I don't work so I can love my job. I work so I can enjoy the time I am not working. I'd rather have a job I can stand with enough money to live well outside the work versus a job I enjoy and a much lower standard of living (and especially a much lower rate of saving for retirement).
Now if I hate my job so much that I can't be productive at it, then obviously a change is necessary.
I think your post is accurate. I worked with C++ for four years and then jumped to Java. It was easy. For amusement, four years after that I tried to jump back to C++ and write a simple program that toyed with buffers. It took a long time to make it compile and even longer before it ran without segfault, and I was writing something I use to create routinely at that previous job.
I'm sure it's difficult. But teaching math in a terrible school district is not easy either. And at least when you screw up the fast food job, you get into trouble and the company loses some money. When you screw up teaching, your students are set up for problems due to poor education that can affect their entire lives.
I hate taxes as much as anyone, but I really think paying (good) teachers top dollar is one of the best moves any country can make to ensure their economic future.
Risk vs. reward is crucial. My sons are in wrestling. Staying at home all day isn't much of a life.
Your son is more likely to get injured on the ice than in a car, but dramatically more likely to get killed in a car than on the ice.
I think this is a difficult area to debate in moral terms because buying better locks for your house doors or a higher model fire extinguisher or a fancier security system for your home does not increase the risk that you kill your neighbor. That makes it difficult to compare car shopping to other forms of personal protection.
But my vehicles routinely transport my four children around, and if my driveway and my budget had room for a school bus, that's what I would use to transport them. I am sympathetic to people who can't afford to participate in this constant escalation of vehicle sizes, and I am also sympathetic to environmental concerns and the desire for independence from oil imports. But I am not willing to take extra risks with my children. We drive two relative giants: Honda Odyssey (aced all crash tests save one in use at the time of its manufacture) and a Ford Flex (aces all current crash tests).
Smaller vehicles like the Mazda5 and Kia Rondo were ruled out because of only average crash test scores, and vehicles like the Kia Sorento, Subaru Tribeca, or Toyota Rav4 were ruled out because they have no side curtain airbag coverage for the third row seats. And many smaller vehicles have no space behind the third row seat, which means a relatively mild rear impact can affect third row occupants. I've seen vehicles with their last row of seats totally destroyed, I refuse to seat my kids in anything with less than a foot of crumple space - that's far from ironclad protection, but at least it's something.
Before I had a family, I didn't care if I commuted on a scooter.